Emanuela Ligal known as "Ligal" in the artwork lives in Padova, the city where she was born in 1958, but in the past she has lived in Tuscany, London and, extremely important for her artistic and personal development, in the Tosho-ji in Kyoto, a Japanese Buddhist temple, where she discovered and embraced the Zen philosophy.

She started drawing at the age of seventeen. In 1984, the entry in the Dance Room of Matisse at the Metropolitan Museum marked another fundamental moment in her artistic life, a "huge revelation", as she reports. She then decided to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In 1996 she finally started to paint on canvass and from that day she has never stopped. She has exhibited around Italy, and in 2000 she held an important personal exhibition in New York City.

The intensity in which she has always lived her life is deeply reflected in her artworks, where the creative surge born from the nucleus of all her past experiences. Ligal, with her work, explores the eternal and human dualism between mask and face, truth and pretence, topicality and virtuality, dream and reality that result in a mystery and alchemic world, an attractive universe of feelings

Emanuela Ligal

born and work in Padua (Italy) but she has sojourned in Tuscany, in London and fundamental for her personal and artistic growth has been the experience lasted one year, at the oriental Buddhist monastery Tosho-ji in Tokyo, were she has known the Zen culture.

In 2000 she has make an important personal exhibition in New York.

Emanuela Ligal has always lived in a deep manner and such intensity is reflected with strength and brilliance also in her paintings where the creative fit born from the core of all her past experiences.

The artist realizes works in acrylic in which the human visage became mask is the main subject.

Fragments of bright colours, in ironical and joyous tones, compose these faces.

She put in scene how in reality everyone always appear in a different way from what he truly is, also in the daily environment of our life.

Ligal investigate, starting from an alert observation and analysis of the man condition in the modern society, the eternal and human dualism between mask and face, truth and pretence, dream and reality.

The result is the awareness of how the man is forced to assume a dress that stifles his real being.

The authoress, availing herself of these figures, she mean to disclose the authentic identity which hide itself behind the human appearances and lay them bare in them pathetic ridiculousness but also in all them human weakness.

The colours, often of bright contrasting tonalities, they are spread by flats background paintings that create figures which remain in the middle between a human visage and its abstraction, the fantasy and the reality.

The human face tends to lose the realistic personal characteristics to transform itself and to merge in a fantastic dimension.

Observing Emanuela Ligal paintings it rise an association rather immediate with one of the literature big master, Luigi Pirandello.

Also if through a kind of investigation more joyful than that of the Italian writer, Ligal makes a lucid pitiless unmasking of the relativity of the human condition rich of appearances and split personality, leading us in a mysterious and alchemic world of feelings, an attractive universe that induce the Italian authoress to probe many countenances and aspects.

By Paola Trevisan

Curriculum vitae:

Emanuela Ligal was born in Padua the 17/05/1958.

She draws and paints from 1977.

From 1978 she spent a year in London at Kensington Garden Square.

Between 1982 and 1983 she lived an experience, lasted one year, in the buddhist
monastery, named Tosho-ji, in Tokyo (Shinagawa-ku) where she was driven by
the Zen master Ban-Roshi and by the well-known Irish nun Maura “Soshin” O’Halloran.

From 1989 she spent a year in Tuscany, during which she exhibited her works in
Chianciano Terme City.

In March 2000 she showed part of her canvases in the gallery “The Emergent Collector”
at the East-village in New York City.

She has attended, in November 2002, the – International Review of Contemporary Art
- Magica - the magic in art – to the Estense Castle of Ferrara.

From the 2002 permanent exposure near
- "La Mostra Gallery" of exclusive Cardiff for United Kingdom
http://www.lamostragallery.com

Today she lives and works in Padua.

Her creativity is the result of her experiences, all, always lived in a very intense manner.
In the apparent banality of the existence, she sees the mask that she or others
personages wear in daily ambits. Irony, originality, are revealed by the bold shapes and the bright colours, always used with masterly skill.

I feel well in the nature, but I live in a complex society; consequently I have become an artist.